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The Rural School 



Discussion by Mrs E. H. Harriman at the Fiftieth 
University Convocation, October 23, 1914 






JUN 18 19t5 



THE RURAL SCHOOL 

It is largely due to Doctor Finley that I am here today. He 
knows that I am an amateur, altogether a novice, on the ques- 
tion of education, but he also knows that my heart is in the rural 
school question, and that I am struggling with it alone in Orange 
county. 

I am very glad to come here today, although my ideas and 
experiences have come to me from associations with others, who 
are better able to teach me than I am to teach them; so it is all 
Doctor Finley's fault, but I am glad to assist. 

It has been my habit all along to do things rather than to talk 
about them. It seems to me that everybody has to do things 
which they are not fitted for, that are not congenial, but I am 
glad to tell you about some things in Orange county which will 
doubtless seem uninteresting after Mr Quick has drawn his pic- 
tures of rural schools and their aims. What I shall give you 
is the result of my three years' experience. 

I shall begin by telling you that I took a permanent stand last 
year and committed myself to rural schools because when that 
wonderful fund was raised in New York for the Young Men's 
and Young Women's Christian Associations, many appeals were, 
of course, made to me, and to them all I made one answer, that 
I could not subscribe to a fund that put a premium on the attrac- 
tions of New York City for the country men and maidens, be- 
cause I had become convinced, having been interested in the 
development of rural conditions and young people, that hon- 
orable careers and professions were possible in rural districts, 
taking for their foundations the rural home — I go back a little 
bit farther, being a woman — I go back to the home, and after 
that the school. But the rural school being the subject of dis- 
cussion today, I shall confine myself to that. 

You all perhaps know, or perhaps you do not know, that the 
Harriman estate is only about twenty miles back from Newburgh, 



fifteen miles from West Point, in the Ramapo mountains, and 
the Ramapo mountains are a continuation of the Appalachian 
range of which Mr Quick has told you and, strange to say, the 
same conditions prevail in the Ramapo mountains to a great 
extent — the same flowers and birds and the same rocks and 
even the same animals, and also the same population. 

Mr Harriman's first efforts when we went to Arden were to 
get all the mountain population down from the mountains into 
the villages where they could be cared for and where they could 
work under better conditions. So I have now under my care on 
the Harriman estate three different types of rural schools, and I 
have learned a great deal from studying their different characters, 
but in them I find three important factors, but quite the same. 
These are the mental and physical condition of the children, the 
need for special training for teachers of rural schools, and the 
rearrangement of the courses of study and the introduction of 
manual training and vocational instruction. 

The first school of which I shall speak is the high school in the 
village of Harriman. It is called the union free school and is 
made up of high school courses and preliminary grades. The 
curriculum required of the pupils is bewildering to an old and 
educated mind, and the demands upon the two teachers are over- 
whelming. I do not know whether I need even to read the 
courses — I fancy you are rather familiar with that kind of a 
school — but it made my hair quite gray to learn that English 
first and second, Latin first and second, German first and second, 
ancient history, drawing, zoology, botany, physiology, algebra 
and geometry were all taught to seventeen pupils by two teachers. 
How they lived through it, I do not know. 

There has been a movement in the right direction because a 
physical examination is being made. The trouble is that it is 
not followed up. I find in America we are wonderful in making 
laws but we do not carry them out. If we spent a little more of 
our time trying to carry out a few good laws, I think perhaps we 
would be more successful. 



Another school about five miles from that, still in Arden, is 
the district school of the village of Arden, and is composed prin- 
cipally of lower grades. There conditions are more normal, both 
as to pupils and teachers, and we have introduced sewing and 
carpentry work and some cooking lessons among these children, 
but it has all been by private effort. In fact, the first time I tried 
to introduce cooking lessons the girls said they did not care about 
it, but fortunately the boys took to it kindly, which induced the 
girls to become interested, so we may be turning out some good 
chefs from our village. 

But the third school is the one to which I want particularly 
to draw your attention, as it covers several problems. It is situ- 
ated at the Sterling mines, which is also our property, consisting 
of about 20,000 acres of very beautiful country, altogether given 
over to mining at present. This school is composed of about 
fifty children, native and foreign born, and also native-born 
mountaineer children. In this school we find combined all the 
questions that cover our immigrant and mountain children, of 
which we have quite a number, and not all confined to Virginia. 
One need not go to Virginia to find very many poor whites, I 
am sorry to say. 

Following the program which I have already given you, that 
the condition of the school and the teachers and the curriculum 
should be the foundations of our rural schools, I have had the 
Binet test made in that school. The Binet test is used exten- 
sively on the arrival of immigrants, to find out whether or not 
those immigrants are eligible for citizenship here. My attention 
was brought to it a few years ago and I thought it would be a 
wonderful way of testing the children of the foreign-born, and 
also of our mountaineer children who are of lower grade. So I 
started at the Sterling mine school, and as the result is rather 
comprehensive I would like to have Doctor Finleylook it over, 
and he probably will be rather shocked to find that among the 
fifty children, there was only one normal and one abnormal — 
rather brighter than usual — and the others were in various 
degrees of backwardness, and a few were defectives. 



These are the children to be taught, and imagine giving them 
a curriculum such as I have read! I turned for help to the 
Education Department that brought me here today, and from 
Doctor Finegan I procured permission to change the course of 
study and sent the under teacher (we have two teachers at this 
school) first to Columbia where they have a summer course for 
training and teaching backward children, and then the following 
year I sent the teacher to the Vineland training school, where the 
course is even more efficient because there they have the care of 
backward children. With this teacher trained in teaching back- 
ward children, and with Doctor Finegan's permission to alter the 
curriculum, this is the third year we have been working. 

The test of the children's condition is taken each year, and 
although the school changes a little there are enough of the 
original pupils to show the improvement that has been made by 
this change of teachers and course of study. I am very much 
encouraged because I find that Providence has given everybody a 
chance to be better, to develop and improve, but the great ques- 
tion is how to do it, so I have taken up this course to determine, 
first of all, what the child is capable of doing, and then with all 
care and patience to give that child a chance to develop along 
that line, and in that way the school is showing a wonderful im- 
provement. I am tremendously gratified by my small efforts in 
this direction. 

Wishing to compare the Sterling mine school with other dis- 
trict schools in the neighborhood, the Ramapo mountains and 
the outskirts, I have had seven schools tested, and find that among 
the hills and the barren regions the children are invariably of a 
lower type of intelligence and physique than where the land is 
more fertile, but where the farms are being developed and fami- 
lies are more prosperous, there the mental and physical conditions 
are better. I have brought these statements with me and will be 
glad to leave them here as they may be of some use in a statis- 
tical way. 

But it all goes to prove, in my mind, that the rural home and 
the rural school are capable of great success; that there is no 



reason why, with favorable conditions, with better teachers, the 
children should not develop into young men and women who 
will be a credit to the country and who will raise the standard 
of rural life. 

I have no great pictures to paint, because my work is in the 
embryo stage, and I think it would be better to begin at the foun- 
dation and work up. While I rejoice in the picture that Mr Quick 
drew, that is what we shall try to live up to, and with favorable 
conditions, and with all working together, because our country 
covers the most fertile and the most barren country and we can 
not neglect the hill country for the sake of the valley country, 
we shall accomplish much. But we have all these different 
types to work with. I have always been told that we must raise 
our lowest before we can reach our highest and I hope that these 
conditions in schools along the border of the Hudson river may 
be improved, through Doctor Finley's efforts. 



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